Long-divided Iraqi Kurds cooperating

Published: Sunday, June 15, 2003

Associated Press

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP)  The two main Iraqi Kurdish groups moved to unite the administration of their two competing strongholds in the Kurdish enclave of northern Iraq, confirming Saturday they will present an outline by month's end on a single government.

Leaders of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, or KDP, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK  the two armed political groups running Kurdish northern Iraq  said they've set up a six-member committee to complete the plan.

"It was a sense of responsibility that persuaded us that this was a must," said Arif Tayfor, a KDP spokesman.

Murad Mohammed Ibrahim, a PUK spokesman, said a unified administration would be based in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil, which houses the Kurdish parliament.

Under U.S.-led aerial protection, Iraqi Kurds, ethnically distinct from the country's majority Arabs, have ruled an autonomous Switzerland-sized stretch of northern Iraq since the end of the first Gulf War more than a decade ago.

But civil war and rivalry between the two main Kurdish groups abated only in 1998.

The two areas developed competing governments  including separate prime ministers and health, defense and finance departments.

Under the terms of a U.S.-brokered peace deal five years ago, the two camps were supposed to unify their administrations.

But they made little progress until October, when they held their first joint meeting of the Kurdish parliament since the mid-1990s.

The two main Kurdish leaders, Jalal Talabani of the PUK and the KDP's Massoud Barzani, have been at odds for years. The two factions fought a bloody civil war from 1994 to 1998. But to show how much they've patched up their differences, the two groups have agreed to send only Talabani to present their plans for a new government to the U.S.-led occupation authority.